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Showing posts from May, 2020

Fun Mistakes and Other Experiments

During the Covid Crisis, I'm bunkered down at home unable to use the college lab I manage. So I've been developing film in my films in the laundry room again with my trusty old JOBO tanks. School was wrapping up and a student found a holder with film in them and I offered to process. I can process 12 sheets at a time with my Jobo and I'm lazy, so I try to fill it and use semi-stand. So I took her two  sheets and found a few of mine to process and made a few to at least get close to the capacity of the tank. Also, recently I "repaired" my old Sakai (Toyo) half plate camera that was converted to 4x5. My high school teacher, Vince Bernucci at Independence High School was kind enough to give this to me in the mid 1980's. At some point the ground glass got broken and recently it occurred to me that I had a transplantable one I could replace it with. The bellows was also all squished up, and I sort of managed to partially straighten that out. Unlike some of my camer

What's the cheapest B&W 120 film available?

Not sure why I'm even looking, I've got plenty. Maybe so I can advise students at my school? In any case, I found myself looking to see what was the cheapest B&W 120 film I could find. In general, I think there's no such thing as a bad film.There are films that are easier to use and process, there are films with various traits that may not be suited for intended use. But I'm no longer interested in the sharpest finest grain films. I used to shoot Tech Pan and Agfapan 25 in the 1980's. Now I look at the prints and negs and, some are pretty nice. But on the whole they are too contrasty. I switched to ORWO NP20 (and later NP22 in the USA) and much prefer those negs. After ORWO stopped making consumer films, I moved on to Acros. Fuji Acros was a beautiful film, with wonderful tones as well as fine grain and minimal reciprocity failure issues. So today I'm going to do some searching and put the results up here. Please note, I'm in the US, so it's US suppl